No American court has ever found a heavy metal record guilty of a death. Not a song, not a band, not the label that pressed it. From a wood on Long Island in the summer of 1984 to a school in Colorado in the spring of 1999 the music was blamed for murder, for assault and for the deaths of teenagers by their own hands, in newspapers, in complaints and on witness stands, and every time the charge was carried as far as a judge it came apart in his hands. The record shows nothing else. The case keeps being brought anyway.
Until 1846 English law kept a name for a thing that had killed a man. It was a deodand. The cartwheel that went over a carter, the boiler that burst in a brewery yard, the ladder that gave way under a slater was valued by the coroner's jury where it lay and forfeited to the Crown, to be given to God, and the wheel was knocked off the axle whether or not its owner had done anything wrong. Heavy metal blamed for violence is the deodand brought back into the room. The jury looks at the body, then reaches past the boy who did it for the object nearest his hand, and through the 1980s the object nearest his hand was a record.
The Sydney band whose 1979 album was hauled into a Los Angeles murder inquiry six years after it came out was AC/DC, and it was neither the first nor the last to find its sleeve entered as an exhibit. The sermons, the hearings and the whole long indictment of the music run through the related chapter. The narrower question is what happened each time a killing had already been done and somebody reached for the record.
The exhibit on the prosecutor's table
Ricky Kasso was seventeen. In June 1984 he killed Gary Lauwers, also seventeen, in woods at Northport on Long Island, and when police arrested him in the first week of July he was wearing an AC/DC T-shirt. He died by suicide in his cell on 7 July 1984.
The shirt did the rest of the work. Within weeks the case was a satanic cult story in the New York papers and, that November, a long feature in Rolling Stone, and the band on the shirt, with the Black Sabbath and Judas Priest records the boy was known to play, went out as a barrage of names fired at every parent who read it. Nobody was charged over a record. Nobody had to be.
Nobody was charged over a record. Nobody had to be.
Ten years later the exhibit reached a jury. At the 1994 trial in Arkansas of Damien Echols and Jason Baldwin for the murders of three eight year old boys from West Memphis, the prosecution laid Echols's black clothes, his reading and the Metallica records he played before the jurors as proof of occult belief, and the witness who explained that belief to the court, holding a doctorate from an unaccredited correspondence school, was Dale Griffis. The convictions stood for seventeen years.
The Bay Area four who let the film about the case use their music for nothing, the first film they had ever cleared a song for, were Metallica, and "Welcome Home (Sanitarium)", "The Call of Ktulu" and "Orion" run under Paradise Lost, which Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky released in 1996. The band whose words had been read to a jury as a confession ended up scoring the film that took the verdict apart.
Heavy metal blamed for violence in the civil courts
The lawsuits put a price on the object. The family of John McCollum sued Osbourne and CBS in Los Angeles in 1985 over "Suicide Solution" and lost on demurrer, a loss the Court of Appeal confirmed on 12 July 1988, and the families of Raymond Belknap and James Vance sued in Nevada over Stained Class, so that the Birmingham band cleared in Reno on 24 August 1990 after nineteen days of trial was Judas Priest. Both complaints were built as product liability, the album as a defective good sold to the vulnerable, and each broke on its own wall: in California a song is speech, which loses its protection only when it aims at imminent lawless action, and in Reno the families never proved that anyone had put a message on the record on purpose.
The Huntington Park quartet whose lyric sheets were filed as exhibits in a San Luis Obispo courtroom was Slayer. Elyse Pahler, fifteen, was killed near Arroyo Grande, California, on 22 July 1995 by three teenagers, who later pleaded no contest to her murder and were sentenced to twenty five years to life. Her parents sued the band, its label American Recordings and the companies that distributed the records in 1996, arguing that "Altar of Sacrifice", "Postmortem" and "Dead Skin Mask" had been sold to minors as harmful matter and had supplied the method.
The judge who dismissed the complaint in January 2001, and the amended version that October, was E. Jeffrey Burke, and his finding was that no legal position could make the band answer for the girl's death and that the records were neither obscene nor harmful to minors. The case never reached a jury. The three young men who did the killing are the only people any court ever held responsible for it.
The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves.
William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, Act I, Scene II
The headline, which needed no statute
When Richard Ramirez was arrested in Los Angeles on 31 August 1985 and charged as the Night Stalker, reporters had already heard from the police that a cap carrying the AC/DC logo had been left at one of the crime scenes and that he admired "Night Prowler", the last song on Highway to Hell, released in 1979, and for a season the song was read in print as a killer's manifesto. AC/DC answered that it was about a boy climbing through his girlfriend's bedroom window. Ramirez was convicted of thirteen murders in September 1989 and sentenced to death, and he died in custody in June 2013.
Columbine gave the method its widest run. On 20 April 1999 two students killed twelve of their schoolmates and a teacher at Columbine High School in Colorado and then themselves, and within days the singer whose name the newspapers and the cable channels reached for was Marilyn Manson, a performer no test the genre applies would call heavy metal, and one the two killers had, by the later reporting, held in contempt. He cancelled the last dates of his tour. On 4 May 1999 the Senate Commerce Committee heard how violence was marketed to children, and the records went back onto the table beside the films and the video games.
Then the blame moved house. The Columbine families who sued went after the makers of video games and films rather than records, and a federal judge in Denver dismissed that suit in March 2002, finding no duty, no product and the First Amendment standing in the way. The salvo went over the guitars and landed on a games console.
| Case | Year | The music named | How it was brought | Outcome |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Ricky Kasso, Northport | 1984 | AC/DC, Black Sabbath, Judas Priest | Press | No case against any record |
| McCollum v. CBS | 1985–1988 | "Suicide Solution" | Civil suit | Dismissed; upheld on appeal, July 1988 |
| Richard Ramirez, Los Angeles | 1985 | "Night Prowler" | Press | No case against the song |
| Vance v. Judas Priest | 1986–1990 | Stained Class | Civil trial | Judgment for the band, 24 August 1990 |
| West Memphis Three | 1994 | Metallica records as evidence | Criminal trial | Convictions; Alford pleas, August 2011 |
| Pahler v. Slayer | 1996–2001 | Three Slayer songs | Civil suit | Dismissed twice, 2001 |
| Columbine | 1999 | Marilyn Manson, KMFDM, Rammstein | Press, Senate hearing | No suit against any record |
Why the charge never holds
On the Welsh border, into the nineteenth century, a house with a corpse in it would send for the sin-eater, a man paid sixpence to eat a loaf and drink a bowl of ale passed across the body, taking the dead man's sins into himself so that the burial could go forward clean, and afterwards the village would not speak to him until the next death. A record declared anathema after a killing is hired for the same office. It carries the guilt out of the house, and the street's attention goes with it.
A court cannot hire one. A complaint has to name a duty, a breach and a cause, and every time a lawyer tried to force a record through those three tests the judge found, where an instruction should have been, a song about despair or murder with the First Amendment standing behind it. On any honest reading that is why the suits ran out in 2001. The demurrers tore the pleadings up count by count and left the killers where the criminal courts had already put them.
The lawsuits ended. The reflex did not, and the smaller versions of it, the shirt in the police photograph, the lyric quoted on the charge sheet, the sleeve held up for the camera, live on among the other heavy metal myths. Nobody has yet sued a riff and won.
